Saint Waltrude Collegiate Church: A Brabantine Gothic Landmark in Mons
Site at a Glance
- Rating
- 4.6
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- Medium
- Country
- Belgium
- Primary era
- Early Modern
- External website
- Open
- Eras represented
- Medieval, Early Modern, Modern
- Civilizations
- Belgian, Habsburg, Holy Roman Empire
- Site type
- Religious
- Remains
- Church
On this page19 sections
History
Saint Waltrude Collegiate Church is a Roman Catholic church in Mons, Belgium, built in the Brabantine Gothic style between 1450 and 1621. Dedicated to Saint Waltrude, the patron saint of Mons, it belongs to the Diocese of Tournai and remains the city’s principal parish church. Its long history began with a religious foundation on the same hill and continued through the rise of an aristocratic chapter, the upheavals of the French Revolution, and the preservation of an important artistic and devotional heritage.
The foundation of the religious community
During the second half of the seventh century, Saint Waltrude, a female religious founder associated with Mons, established a small community and probably an oratory or hermitage on the hill. Several earlier churches occupied the site before the present building. The first oratory was later succeeded by churches dedicated in turn to Saint Peter, Our Lady, and Saint Waltrude.
After Waltrude’s death, the community expanded. Between the tenth and thirteenth centuries, its regular nuns became secular canonesses. Unlike monks, secular canonesses did not form a monastic community or take vows of poverty and chastity, and they retained personal property. Their institution became the noble chapter of Sainte-Waudru. Its members received prebends, incomes assigned to holders of offices in a collegiate chapter, along with other privileges that helped finance the construction of the present church.
The noble chapter and the new church
The chapter’s admission rules expressed its aristocratic character. In the thirteenth century, a candidate generally had to be the daughter of a knight. In 1769, Empress Maria Theresa required candidates to prove sixteen noble quarters of ancestry. The canonesses were also associated with religious dramas during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, adding a cultural role to their religious and institutional life.
In 1449, the chapter decided to replace its old church. Construction began in 1450 at the eastern end, following plans prepared by local architects and Mathieu de Layens, a fifteenth-century architect from the Low Countries associated with major Brabantine Gothic buildings. The project lasted 241 years. Although successive master builders directed the work, the essential character of the original design was preserved.
The choir was completed in 1506, the transept around 1525, and the nave by 1589. The final bays were finished by 1621, bringing the main body of the church to completion. A much taller façade tower was also planned. Work on it began in 1548, inspired by the tower of Saint Rumbold’s Cathedral in Mechelen, but construction stopped permanently in 1691 at the level of the nave roof. The planned tower would have risen more than 190 metres. Its unfinished state became proverbial in Mons as a way of describing something that takes an exceptionally long time to complete.
The church also suffered damage during the siege of 1691, when the spire above the crossing was lost. A replacement was erected around 1715. The chapter itself survived until the French administration dissolved it in February 1793. It briefly resumed during the Austrian restoration, but ended permanently in June 1794.
Revolution, parish use, and continuing traditions
During the French Revolution, the church was converted into a stable and narrowly escaped demolition. It returned to Catholic worship in 1803, but no longer served as the personal collegiate church of the canonesses. Instead, it became Mons’s principal parish church after the adjacent Church of Saint-Germain had been demolished in 1799.
The church’s religious identity continued through ceremonies and processions. During the Ducasse de Mons, an annual religious and civic festival, performers wearing sixteenth- and eighteenth-century choir costume take part in ceremonies connected with the descent and raising of Saint Waltrude’s shrine. The Car d’Or procession also remains a central expression of this tradition. The gilded wooden carriage, made between 1779 and 1782, carries the shrine through Mons each year on Trinity Sunday.
The building is protected as a classified cultural-heritage property of Wallonia and is recognized as part of Wallonia’s major heritage. Stained glass was maintained and restored over several centuries. A major restoration campaign lasted from 1838 to 1891. During the Second World War, the windows were removed for repair and reinstalled in 1947, while the nave windows were reconstructed from surviving fragments between 1957 and 1966.
The organ has likewise undergone repeated rebuilding. Maurice Delmotte created the present instrument in 1952, and Klais of Bonn and Thomas of Belgium restored and enlarged it in 2019. These interventions, together with the continuing care of the church’s windows, artworks, furnishings, and relics, have allowed the building to retain both its religious function and its historical character.
Remains
Saint Waltrude Collegiate Church is a large Brabantine Gothic building on a cross-shaped plan. It measures 115 metres in length and 32 metres in width, while the vault rises 24.5 metres to its keystone. Sandstone forms the principal exterior material, blue stone from Hainaut is used inside, and brick was employed for the vaults. The choir is encircled by a passage known as an ambulatory, with 15 chapels radiating outward. The nave has three aisles, the transept is single-aisled, and chapels form a circuit around the main body of the church.
Unfinished tower and sculptural heritage
The projected façade tower
The projected façade tower was designed to exceed 190 metres and drew inspiration from Saint Rumbold’s Cathedral in Mechelen. Only the section reaching the height of the central nave roof was built. The unfinished upper portion preserves the interruption of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century building campaign in the fabric of the church.
Jacques Du Brœucq’s works
Numerous works by Jacques Du Brœucq, a sixteenth-century sculptor and architect of the Southern Netherlands, survive inside the church. Most were originally created for a Renaissance rood screen installed at the entrance to the choir between 1545 and 1549. This substantial screen separated the choir from the nave and had a black-marble structure decorated with alabaster reliefs and free-standing statues. It was dismantled or destroyed in 1797, after which many of Du Brœucq’s surviving works were recovered and placed in different parts of the building.
These sculptures include a relief of the Resurrection, statues of the cardinal and theological virtues, and a statue of Saint Bartholomew. Other alabaster works include a crucifix and a statuette of Abraham meeting Melchizedek. The church also preserves a fourteenth-century polychrome wooden statue of Saint James the Apostle, late-fifteenth-century polychrome wooden statues of Saint Waltrude and her daughters, and sixteenth-century painted wooden figures representing Saint Waltrude or Saint Gertrude as a foundress.
Stained glass
Choir and apse windows
The church preserves 21 sixteenth-century stained-glass windows, described as the most complete surviving group of its kind in Belgium. They combine donors, saints, coats of arms, and biblical scenes, revealing the gradual introduction of Renaissance elements into a strongly Gothic artistic tradition.
Five three-lancet windows in the apse were donated by Emperor Maximilian I in 1510 and 1511. They depict members of his family. The choir glazing presents episodes from the lives of Christ and the Virgin, culminating in a Crucifixion at the centre of the apse. Other choir windows depict scenes from both the Old and New Testaments.
Transept and nave windows
The transept windows were produced between 1523 and 1533. The windows identified in the south arm depict the Annunciation and the Baptism of Christ, while the window on the north front represents the Dormition of the Virgin.
Eight upper nave windows were reassembled and restored from fragments of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century glazing. The northern group depicts the Combat of Saint Michael, Saints Henry and Michael, the Adoration of the Magi, and the Transfiguration. The southern group represents the Assumption, Christ’s Agony in the Garden of Olives, the Litany of the Virgin, and the Ecce Homo.
Neo-Gothic chapel glazing
Forty neo-Gothic windows decorate the ground-floor chapels. They were produced between 1853 and 1930. The nave windows had earlier been removed in the mid-nineteenth century and replaced with clear glass before being reconstructed from surviving fragments during the twentieth century.
Furnishings and musical heritage
Choir stalls and pulpit
The oak choir stalls date from 1707. They were made for the former Church of Saint-Germain and transferred to Sainte-Waudru after that building was destroyed. Their decoration includes busts of the Evangelists, the Fathers of the Church, the Virgin, and Christ. The pulpit also came from Saint-Germain and dates from the first third of the eighteenth century.
The organ
The organ façade has a late-Baroque Louis XVI appearance and originally belonged to Cambron Abbey. Made around 1780, it was transferred to Sainte-Waudru in the early nineteenth century. The original case held a French classical instrument probably consisting of 49 stops on four manuals and pedal, associated with an instrument built around 1693 by Matthieu Le Roy.
Delmotte’s 1952 instrument initially had 46 stops on three manuals and pedal with electro-pneumatic action. The 2019 restoration created an enlarged symphonic organ with 79 stops on four manuals and pedal. It includes transmissions, extended stops, an acoustic stop, and a solo division. Its key action is mechanical, while its stop action is electrical.
Relics, bells, and processional objects
Saint Waltrude’s shrines
The neo-Gothic shrine of Saint Waltrude stands above the high altar. Made of gilded brass in 1887, it is decorated with precious and semi-precious stones, enamels, and cabochons. Its form resembles a small church, with a transept, pinnacles, and cresting. Figures of Christ and the Virgin and Child occupy the gables. Along the sides are groups representing Saint Waltrude and her daughters, and Saint Vincent and his sons, accompanied by six apostles for each group.
The 1887 shrine replaced an earlier reliquary made of gilded copper and silver in 1313. That earlier shrine was destroyed in 1794 during the second French Revolutionary invasion of Mons. The present shrine contains Saint Waltrude’s bones, except for her head, which had been separated from the other relics in 1250.
A separate reliquary for the saint’s head dates from 1867. Made of silver and gilded brass, it is decorated with coloured stones and cabochons and takes the form of an elaborate canopy sheltering the saint’s crowned head.
Bells and the Car d’Or
The church’s bells were confiscated when the building was used as a stable during the French occupation. Two replacement bells were cast in 1820 for the new belfry and named Désirée and Joséphine after their female sponsors. Another bell was dedicated in 1956 to the resistance member Marguerite Bervoets.
The Car d’Or is a carved, painted, and gilded wooden processional carriage in the Louis XVI style, made between 1779 and 1782. Normally kept in the north aisle, it carries Saint Waltrude’s shrine, a priest, and twelve choirboys. Six draft horses draw it during the annual procession.
Treasury and other artworks
A treasury of liturgical objects and older reliquaries occupies an annex reached through a small doorway opening onto the transept. Its recorded contents include chalices, ciboria, monstrances, censers, incense boats, altar candlesticks, and Gothic-style vessels dating from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries.
Other artworks include paintings associated with Peter Paul Rubens, Floris de Vriendt, Theodoor van Thulden, Otto Venius, and Michiel Coxie, as well as seventeenth-century tapestries from Enghien. Important graves include those of Antoine de Carondelet and Alice of Namur.
